Dennehy’s Vivid Performances Fit Chicago Stage

When Brian Dennehy steps onto the stage at the Goodman Theatre and launches into his bravura portrayal of Erie Smith, the washed-up hustler at the heart of Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie,” you sense that you are watching a man who is very much at home.

That is hardly surprising, given how much of his life Mr. Dennehy has spent treading the floorboards of the world’s stages, and this stage in particular. In the 25 years since his Chicago theater debut, Mr. Dennehy, 71, has become a fixture at the Goodman. And while he continues to call his native Connecticut home, in many ways he has come to represent the thriving theater culture in his adopted city.

“It’s funny how many people now think of Brian as a Chicago-based actor,” said Robert Falls, the Goodman’s artistic director and Mr. Dennehy’s longtime friend and collaborator, although he added that the misconception makes a certain amount of sense.

“I think there’s a style of Chicago theater — and that’s a cliché, but there are truths in clichés,” Mr. Falls said. “It’s this straight-ahead, highly intelligent, rough-edged physicality. And Brian fits in with that.”

There was a time when Mr. Dennehy also fit in with the city’s hard-drinking bar culture, frequenting the now-closed O’Rourke’s tavern and the blues bar Kingston Mines, sometimes emerging after daybreak. Those days, Mr. Dennehy said with a rueful laugh, are over.

Sitting down with Mr. Dennehy feels a bit like pulling up a chair for a chat with an irascible uncle mellowed only slightly with age. At 11 in the morning, Mr. Dennehy’s white hair was in disarray and his face creased with age and sleep. A frozen coffee drink, topped with whipped cream, sat mostly untouched at his elbow.

Whatever fatigue remained from the previous night’s two-hour performance evaporated at the interview’s first question. Mr. Dennehy, every inch the performer, came to life. His broad, ruddy face brightened as he described the high points of his lengthy career and his lifelong love affair with the works of Samuel Beckett, whose one-act opus “Krapp’s Last Tape” serves as the second half of his Goodman double bill.

“It’s probably the greatest play I’ve ever been involved with,” Mr. Dennehy said. “And I’ve done a lot of great plays. But ‘Krapp’s’ is everybody’s life.”

The appeal of the work, he said, is that it is both a brooding character study and a wryly comical jab at the elaborate self-delusion — I’m unique, my story will be different — that makes life livable.

Photo

Brian Dennehy, in “Krapp's Last Tape,” said he enjoyed the play's “dark, sardonic humor of life.”Credit
Bonnie Trafelet/Chicago News Cooperative

“It’s the dark, sardonic humor of life,” Mr. Dennehy said. In the end, he added, “It doesn’t make any difference whether you fail or succeed.”

Mortality, his own included, is very much on Mr. Dennehy’s mind. It would be strange if it were not, given the subject matter he wrestles with eight times a week.

The themes that haunt “Hughie” and “Krapp’s” — impending death, ruined dreams, lost loves — bind the otherwise unrelated works. Where Beckett’s play is a masterpiece of meaningful silences, “Hughie” is all brashness and bluster, its avalanche of words a transparent, futile attempt to distract everyone — the audience, the characters themselves — from Erie Smith’s obvious heartbreak.

Mr. Falls, who directs Mr. Dennehy in “Hughie,” has watched his friend wring unexpected nuances from Erie Smith. They have staged the play several times during their decades-long collaboration, which began in 1985 when Mr. Dennehy and the director Steven Robman saw “Rat in the Skull” at New York’s Public Theater.

“Rat” soon moved to Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge Theater, with Mr. Dennehy attached. The production, under Mr. Falls’s artistic direction, was Mr. Dennehy’s first experience with Chicago theater. Twenty-five years later, he remains in the city’s thrall.

“When I first came here, I recognized immediately that there was so much going on,” Mr. Dennehy said. “Mamet had just begun to emerge, and Steppenwolf’s name was on everyone’s lips. It was explosive. But the best thing about Chicago, and every actor will say this, are the audiences.”

He said there was a willingness, even an eagerness, to be challenged by a piece of theater.

The Chicago theater community, he said, plays the role of provocateur, in part because the theaters here, unlike in more expensive cities like New York, can afford, quite literally, to take risks. That means directors and producers like Mr. Falls can take a chestnut like “Death of a Salesman” and turn it on its ear, yielding a surprising new iteration of a classic work. And chances are, if the work is solid, Chicago audiences will embrace it wholeheartedly.

Mr. Dennehy recalled a recent trip to Gibson’s restaurant with friends visiting from New York. “They couldn’t get over two things,” he said. “First, it was really loud. And second, people were actually eating. And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s Chicago.’ That’s the thing about life here: You get in there, with your fork and your knife and your glass. And when you go to the theater it’s the same thing.

“This is a town of unapologetic appetites — intellectual, emotional, physical,” Mr. Dennehy said. “Chicago never apologizes for itself. It just is what it is, which is wonderful for me, because I’m pretty much the same. Except that I don’t drink anymore.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 24, 2010, on page A27B of the National edition with the headline: Dennehy’s Vivid Performances Fit Chicago Stage. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe